3rd Week in Wroclaw 22 April - 28 April

This is an exciting week for us.  We get to teach our first English class and will hold meetings with the missionaries.  So here is our schedule:

Tuesday:  11:30 - District Meeting.  We meet with the Elders and Sisters.  Elder Weir is the DL, so he conducts the meeting.  We have been reading the BofM as a mission and are in Ether.  Elder Weir asked each of us about our thoughts and what the BofM means to us.  It was a very wonderful meeting.  Sisters Ence and Smithee will be leaving us next week.  They are on their way home.  It will also be transfers, so we don't know who will be coming or goihg. 

Wednesday:  3:30 pm - Missionary Correlation Meeting.  President Cielenski conducts this meeting.  The missionaries tell them what they have been doing and who they have been teaching. 

Wednesday:  5:00 pm - we teach the advance English class.  The missionaries teach the beginning and intermediate classes. The classes rotate every 9 weeks.  We have two people in our Advance class.  We have a prayer and spiritual thought.  Then we have them read an article from the Liahona.  We usually discuss some vocabulary words from the article they may not understand and then we play some kind of word association game.  All of the people that come are not members of the church, so we use this as a means to introduce the gospel to them.  We are going to be baptizing one of the gentlemen that is in the beginning class soon. 

One person in our class - Mikel - is working on his PHD is Cosmetology.  He had to present a paper in English on Thursday to his professors, so we stayed after and helped him with the pronunciation and spelling.

Thursdays and Fridays we are on our own.  Wayne and I have been going over the inactive lists and trying to see where people live.  Some of them live two hours away and President Nielson doesn't want us to worry about them right now.  One day there will be more branches and hopefully wards all over so that people don't have to travel so far. 

Anyways, on Sunday after we gave our talks, President Cielenski asked us over to dinner.  He and his wife has two little girls.  They are an awesome family.  We really enjoyed ourselves and got to know them a little bit better.

Also, this week I made some brownies.  They turned out hard as a rock.  Don't know what I did, but they went right in the trash.  It is District Conference this coming weekend and Sister Reed and I are in charge of the lunches and Primary.  So we decided to make brownies and cookies.  I tried again and this time they worked.  Thank heaven.

So Saturday morning we set off for Katowice.  The District President - Pres. Pawlik - was going to be replaced, so they expected a bigger crowd than usual.  There were two meetings on Saturday.  A Priesthood session and a Relief Society session.  Since most of the members come from far away, they usually bring the whole family to the church.  Sis. Reed and I had to have activity time for the children that would be there.  We did a reference program and talked about church mice and how quiet they should be.  Everyone made mouse ears and we gave everyone a little stuffed mouse also.

 

Then we explained the Whole Armor of God and had them color and cut out the different parts, the belt, shield, etc.  They then glued these to another paper that had the outline of a little boy on it.

 

All of the kids really enjoyed the time spent with us.  In between the Priesthood/RS meetings and the adult session, we fed everyone dinner.  We had ordered Pizza and drinks and some of our desserts.

 

During the Adult meeting, President Nielson, President Pawlik and our Area Seventy, Elder Olsen spoke.  It was a very good meeting.

 

Sunday morning we had to go over to the church early and get everything ready for the luncheon that would be served after the meeting so that people would have something to eat prior to going home.  We fixed sandwiches, fruit, potato chips, drinks and desserts.  There were about 90 people that were there.  We had a hard time getting everyone into the chapel area.  So they released President Pawlik and put in Brother Zan from Wroclaw as the new District President.  He is the one that helps Wayne with the money and teaches the Priesthood lesson in our branch.  Him and his wife have 3 boys and she is pregnant with her fourth.  It will probably be very hard to their family for a little while, especially when he has to travel.  But he is a very spiritual man and will do an awesome job.  

 

I forgot to tell you what we did on Monday this week.  They have an Island here called Catholic Island.  There are about 14 Catholic churches on the island.  This is just one of them.  Also to get to the island you cross a bridge that they call Lock Bridge.  Couples that have just gotten married, buy a lock and attach it to the bridge and then throw the key into the river.  It symbolizes their eternal marriage.  There are tons of locks on the bridge.

Week 2 in Wroclaw

On the weekend of the 19th and 20th we got to go back to Lodz for a Senior Couple conference and learn from President and Sister Nielson what our responsibilities are.  We met the other couples that are scattered all over Poland.  It was exciting to meet with others that spoke English and all had the same stories to tell.  Between the 7 couples, we had a total of 165 grandchildren.  That is awesome.  We were spiritually fed that couple of days and the Nielsons said their goodbyes to all.  They will be missed greatly.  Here is a picture of the 7 couples.

E/S Jensen- Warsaw; E/S Reed- Katowice; E/S Hutchinson - Office; E/S Tufts- Gdansk; E/S Durrant- Wroclaw; E/S Sheley- Poznan; and E/S Lloyd- Lodz.

We all went out to dinner on Friday night and had some good Polish food.  On Saturday after our training we all went on a tour of Lodz.  During the war time, Lodz was a big manufacturing place for cloth.  We went to one of the old factories and toured the facility.  Below is a picture of many plants that were all together.  The workers worked 12 hour days and breathed in harmful dust and lost fingers and parts of their arms from getting them caught in the machinery.  Most of the workers didn't last longer than three years.

 

We left Lodz and got home about 8:00 pm.  Wayne and I still had to prepare talks for Sunday.  That was an experience also.  We had to allow time for our interpreters, so we had to cut our talks in half.  I asked Cindy to help me be my interpreter.  She is about 17 and talks perfect English.  She is hoping she can go to BYU.  She is a beautiful young lady. Wayne asked AJ who is 14 to help him intrepret.  Here is a piture of their family.  Cindy is on the right and AJ is the only boy.

 

The talks went good.  Wayne had to stay to do tithing with Brother Zan.  Once again everyone stayed until 3:00 pm to talk and do other church business.  We are very tired when we get home.  Especially because Wayne has a meeting at 3:30 pm.  Another week down.  Our biggest week is coming up. 

Home in Wroclaw

We finally made it to Wroclaw on Friday, the 12th of April.  The Elders (Stumpf and Weir) and Sisters (Ence and Smithee) came to our apartment to welcome us here. 

Our apartment is awesome.  We have a refridgerator and a freezer, a microwave and an oven.  There is a washing machine in our apartment but not a dryer.  No one in Poland has a dryer.  So we got a couple of clothes racks that we put up in our room and the clothes dry overnight.  Here are a few pictures of our apartment.

 Kitchen 

 Living Room

 

There were a few problems with the language barrier.  Grocery shopping was a joke.  I couldn't remember what Sis. Lloyd had told me to buy for anything.  We didn't know what the word for chicken was, or butter, or what type of flour to buy.  We just laughed and hoped we bought the right stuff.  Then when we got to the counter to check out it was a disaster.  We asked the clerk if she spoke English and of course she didn't.  The money here is in Slotz (pronouce swots).  We couldn't under stand what she meant, so Wayne just held out some money and she took what she needed.  The lowest Slotz is a 10.  Everything below that is in coins.  So 5 slotz is a coin.  The ratio to american dollars is about 3 to one.  So for 10 slotz about 3.37 dollars worth of stuff.  Also we learned that the stores don't have bags, you have to being your own.  Well we forgot, and we had walked to the store. That was really fun.  You fill up your car with gas first and then pay.  There is only one exit out of the gas station, so no one can leave without paying.  To fill up our tank on the car is about $55.00.  Here are pictures of the outside of our building and our huge car.

 

 

Going to church was fun.  Everyone greeted us very warmly.  The President of our Branch has Cerebral Palsy and has to get around with crutches.  He is awesome.  He has been doing everything by himself for the last three months.  We do have a Primary and Mutual Program.  There's three famillies in our branch and a lot of single or divorced women.  Our RS President is divorced because of her membership in the church, but she has a wonderful testimony.  She doesn't speak English at all.  So the missionaries sit by me and interpret everything for me.

 

This is the street we walk down to go to church.  The church is about a mile from our apartment, but because parking is a nightmare in Wroclaw, we walk.  People park on the sidewalk or any where else they can find.  See the trams, we are serenaded everynight by the clickety-clack of the trams, sirens of ambulances that seem to go off every 15 mins, and because there is a mile stretch on this road between red lights, the motorcyclists rev their bikes at night also.

Wayne was called to be the 1st Councilor in the Branch Presidency on the 14th of April, which was our Fast Sunday.  Both Wayne and I bore our testimonies that morning in broken Polish.  Everyone just smiled and nodded their heads. 

 

Monday is our P-Day, so we asked the missionaries over for dinner that night.  I bought some chicken and was going to make a sauce to go over noodles.  Everything was fine until I added the thickening, which I thought was Cornstarch.  It sure wasn't.  It was a gooey mess.  The missionaries were really polite though and ate everything.  I really felt sorry for them.  I did have success with some Chocolate Chip cookies.  They don't have chocolate chips here.  You have to break up a candy bar and use that.  They had quite a few of those.  I have a convection oven so you have to watch everything very carefully and everything is in the metric system, so converting oven temperatures was exciting, too.  Thank heaven for the internet.

 

Because of the Tram and the traffic on the roads, they have underground walkways at each corner.  This is a picture of one of them.  They also have stores in these walkways.  And lots of bread and fruit stands.  Polish people love their breads and donuts.

 

Our first week in Wroclaw was exciting and scary.  But we made it through.  More to come.



Off to Poland 4-08-13

We finally got everything packed and hoped our luggage didn't weigh over 50 lbs. each.  We were excited to get on the plane and head east to France and then on to Poland.  The flight was long and tiring.  When we got to Warsaw, we went to get our luggage and one of Wayne's was missing.  We had to go to the baggage claim and without being able to speak Polish, it was quite the nightmare.  We didn't have the address of the Mission Home or President Nielson's phone number so we told the person at the claim desk (hoping he would understand) that we would call them back when we got to the Mission Home.  We were also hoping that someone was still waiting for us outside because it was taking so long.  When we went through the doors to the outside, there stood Pres. and Sister Nielson.  It was good to be able to talk to someone that understood you. 
They took us right to the Mission Home and had dinner waiting for us.  We went right to bed after dinner.  It was 6:00 pm.  Here is a picture of the room we slept in our first night in Poland.

The next morning wasn't any better.  We just could not adjust to the hour difference.  But we had a wonderful breakfast.  Elder and Sister Hutchinson from the Mission office came over and gave us keys for our apartment in Wroclaw and some other information.  The Elders that were the Assistant's to the president met us also and gave us a GPS and our phone.  President Nielson told us to go to Lodz first and meet with the Senior Couple there for a couple of days.  They would tell us what our duties were.  So the President handed us the keys to our car and the GPS and said to go.  WOW were we scared.  The GPS took us right to Lodz where we met with Elder and Sister Lloyd.  They were so nice.  Here is the Hotel we stayed in in Lodz.

And here is the chapel for the Lodz branch.

 

Elder and Sister Lloyd took us to the grocery store and told us what and what not to buy.  Here is the store and what we saw.

Everything is in big boxes.  The milk is in a box on the shelf.  (That took some getting used to.  It doesn't taste like milk either)  Everyone drinks juices here.  They are pretty good.  Some crazy combinations though.  You can't drink the water here, so we have to buy bottled water also.  The fruit and vegetables come right from the farms, so we have to let them soak in water and clorox for 10 minutes.  Even the eggs have to be washed.  They don't have any prepared foods like Hamburger Helper, so everything has to be cooked from scratch.  I didn't realize how much I had used things like that.  It's a whole re-learning process.  And since we don't know polish, it's really fun trying to figure out what we are buying.  There are no packaged meats.  You buy everything from the meat counter.  I am one of the lucky ones.  We have a freezer in our apartment, so I can buy for a week instead of going every day.  

 

Next the Lloyds showed us around the city of Lodz (Wooj).  It is very dirty in some spots.  Arturo Rubenstein was born in Lodz, so we had to get our picture taken next to him. 

 

The picture above is of "P" Street.  It is the longest street in Eastern Europe and there are restaurants and stores on it.  Everyone goes to "P" Street for everything.

 

Remember the picture above of the Hotel we stayed in.  It was a beautiful hotel.  The picture below is from the back window in our room.  Quite a different sight. 

 

Well our two days were up.  We plugged in our GPS and headed for our city of assignment,  Wroclaw.  It was a 3 1/2 hour trip.  We didn't know what was awaiting us, but we were excited to get there and get started.

 

 

 

Sunday March 31, 2013

We had a wonderful time with everyone.  Wayne's brother and sisters came and so did my brothers.  It was good to have everyone together.

 

Doug, Rob and Michelle

 

 

 

6 of our 7 children.  Pretty handsome, huh?

 

 

 

Some of the grandkids.  Joshua, Alex, Derek, Garrison,

Wayde, Kameron, Ryland and Benjamin

 

 

 

 

And here is Sara, Megan, Kaylee and Claire

 

 

 

 

Here's my side of the family.  My sister-in-law Dianne, my brothers Gary and Rob,

and me and Wayne

 

 

 



First Week - MTC Provo and Easter Weekend

The Senior Couple Missionaries met in the chapel next to the MTC.  There were 124 couples.  The largest group they have ever had.  40 of those couples were going to Martin's Cove for 6 months.  We were the only couple going for 23 months and to Poland.  We were in a district with 3 other couples with which we did all our training.

It was an excellent week and we are excited to leave for Poland.

Pictured are Elders and Sisters Durrant, Batson, Childs and Minnicks.

Sunday 31, 2013.  Farewell and family get together.  It was fun having most of our family with us.  Teri and her family were unable to come on Easter, but spent two wonderful weeks with us prior to that.  And Emily wasn't there because our family grew by one two weeks before.  Anna joined our family on March 16th.  We can't wait to be able to hold her and tell her all about our experiences.
On Friday, the 29th we had our final all American dinner - hot dogs and hamburgers - along with Dad's favorite salad.

 

 

 

 

We had an Easter Egg Hunt also.

First day as Missionaries 04/01/2013

1 day down...approximately 699 days to go.